God I forgot how punch-you-in-the-heart this episode was. Even the little fake ident the BBC guy whipped up made me sad.
Lots of people involved in the making of this episode livetweeted it – Matt Smith, Karen Gillan, Tony Curran, Bill Nighy and Richard Curtis (from Emma Freud’s account). They shared lots of great, funny stuff! And then some serious stuff. Honestly the whole thing reads like a joint interview when you put it together, so I DID put (a lot of it) together-
‘LOVING VINCENT,’ an Animated Film Featuring 12 Oil Paintings per Second by Over 100 Painters
‘Loving Vincent’ will be the world’s first feature length painted animation, with every shot painted with oil paints on canvas, just as Van Gogh himself painted.
Written & Directed by Dorota Kobiela & Hugh Welchman, produced by Poland’s BreakThru Films & UK’s Trademark Films. The film is scheduled for a 2017
release.
“Every one of the 65,000 frames of the film is an oil-painting hand-painted by 125 professional oil-painters who traveled from all across Europe to the Loving Vincent studios in Poland and Greece to be a part of the production.”
“The film was first shot as a live action film with actors then hand-painted over frame-by-frame in oils. The final effect is an interaction of the performance of the actors playing Vincent’s famous portraits, and the performance of the painting animators, bringing these characters into the medium of paint.”
“Loving Vincent is an investigation delving into the life and controversial death of Vincent Van Gogh, one of the world’s most beloved painters, as told through his paintings and by the characters that inhabit them,”
“The intrigue unfolds through interviews with the characters closest to Vincent and through dramatic reconstructions of the events leading up to his death.”
I used to really worry that medications would harm my creativity and it’s part of why I resisted taking them. It hasn’t. If anything it’s allowed me to be more focused and able to complete things. My imagination hasn’t changed just because I’m on anti-depressants.
a lot of my family didnt want me to start medications because they thought it would impact my ability to create, and I believed them.
Now im getting better and better with my art because i dont have to fight through the brainfog or the constant panic attacks and can dedicate my energy to my work.
Antidepressents didnt take my emotions away, they made them easier to handle.
also Van Gogh was literally in an asylum receiving mental health treatment when he painted ‘Starry Night’. It was one of the most stable & productive periods of his life, despite the fact that wasn’t hugely effective treatment, because they didn’t really have modern understandings of what things work on mental illness. Like, you know. Medication.
This is why we don’t romanticize mental illness or chronic disease.
ALSO because I am reading a book of his letters right now, Van Gogh himself addressed the idea that the best art came from pain and said that his art tended to suffer when his depression was hitting pretty hard. So don’t even pull that shit where you give his untreated depression credit for his art. Van Gogh would have hated that, and if antidepressants/better treatment of mental illness HAD existed then we might have even more of his work now.
If ONE MORE PERSON says “What if they’d medicated Van Gogh!?” I think I’m permitted to set things on fire. If they’d medicated Van Gogh, he’d either have painted twice as much, or he’d have been happy and unproductive. And you know what? Starry Night wasn’t worth a terrible price in human misery. It’s neat. It wasn’t worth it.
Sometimes I wonder if being an artist makes me jaded to ART. Because it’s not magic and it’s not mystical, it’s just paint or pixels. And it can do amazing things! But you don’t owe humanity to be miserable just so you can move paint around in interesting shapes. Jesus. Art is not some kind of Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas bargain where you agree to be miserable so everybody can go “oh! Neat!” for 5 minutes.
Many people seem to think it foolish, even superstitious, to believe that the world could still change for the better. And it is true that in winter it is sometimes so bitingly cold that one is tempted to say, ‘What do I care if there is a summer; its warmth is no help to me now.’
Yes, evil often seems to surpass good. But then, in spite of us, and without our permission, there comes at last an end to the bitter frosts. One morning the wind turns, and there is a thaw. And so I must still have hope.
Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.
